Today's complex and rapidly changing technology infrastructures demand increasing support and management. Operations management solutions support large and complex computing infrastructures with thousands of computing devices. An organization may use operations management to help meet business goals and objectives. These goals may include reducing costs, complexity, and providing information security. Reducing costs and complexity is important because, in addition to making up a significant part of the Information Technology (“IT”) budget, the business impact of failed systems or performance degradation can be significant. This can result in increased operational costs, decreased quality of service, and lost revenue.
One type of operations management solution enables network administrators to monitor the health and status of an organization's computing devices. These computing devices may number in the thousands and are typically coupled to a network. Device monitoring may extend to personal computers (“PCs”), servers, laptops, hand-held devices, mobile devices, cluster systems, and any other type of computing device or the like. A key aspect of device monitoring is to determine and indicate whether the device is operational as well as able to perform its intended function.
Some key challenges related to device monitoring in large operations include monitoring large numbers of devices in an efficient manner and reporting status to administrators for the devices in a timely manner. Accomplishing this without overloading networking and computing infrastructure is a further challenge. Another challenge for device monitoring systems is security. Challenges related to security include resisting denial-of-service attacks, detecting status information from unauthorized devices, as well as other security considerations.